Respawn title called a “sci-fi shooter” by EA’s Gibeau

EA Games Label president Frank Gibeau said during an E3 meeting this morning that the firm plans to alternate Battlefield and Medal of Honor releases on an annual basis, and will release Respawn’s project when it sees an “opportunistic” window for what he called a “sci-fi shooter”.

According to Gibeau: “In general we’re going to continue to follow our rotation strategy of giving studios a full two-year cycle to get a game built and polished to maximum quality, but we’re going to do it in a way that allows us to maximize technology investments like Frostbite 2, the online service models that we’re doing… we’re going to be able to trade team knowledge and increase the quality of the products year in, year out,” he said.

“The idea is to have that rotation happen with Battlefield and Medal of Honor and keep it fresh so you don’t burn the teams down or over-annualize the product lines. Titles like Respawn – and I think the Insomniac title is a little bit more of an action game than a pure shooter – we’ll sprinkle those in where we see opportunistic gaps, either in a release schedule or in a genre standpoint.

“Those typically are more sci-fi oriented shooters, where as the Medal of Honor and Battlefield brands are obviously more modern military oriented. So it allows us to pick and choose the best of the sci-fi shooters. It allows us to compete with things like Gears and Halo and put them on places in our release calendar where they’re not cannibalistic to the core business and that’s the essential strategy going forward.”

It has along been the rumor that Respawn’s title for EA Partners was a sci-fi shooter, and Gibeau’s comment pretty much confirms it.

Repsawn recently hired Star War artist Iain McCaig. who has created many sci-fi characters in the past.